Pork and Fishes

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With great fanfare, Alaska Airlines recently rolled out what it calls the "Salmon-Thirty-Salmon." Thirty painters worked around the clock for 24 days to paint a 100-foot salmon on a 737 airplane, which went into service today.

The $500,000 paint job is part of a campaign to promote the Alaskan seafood industry, and was paid for by the federal government. It's a pork project that some are calling "fishy."

"Only Congress can turn fish into pork," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "Paint jobs for private airplanes are one thing, but Uncle Sam should not be paying for it."

The Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board actually paid for the paint job. The board was created less than three years ago. Since then, the group has received nearly $30 million from the federal government - funding pushed through by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. [my emphases]

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Must be nice living in Alaska. Being less people live in our largest state than on the twenty-five thousand acres of Manhattan Island, they sure get their fair share of my tax money. Might be nice to fix the bridges to Manhattan before we build bridges to nowhere in Alaska.

Link via Maru